Plausible Scenarios for Future States of the Arctic: Seattle, Washington, April 2018 Workshop

The Study of Environmental Arctic Change convened an Arctic scenarios workshop 19-22 April 2018 in Seattle, Washington. The Arctic Futures 2050 Scenarios Workshop focal question was: “what information is needed to adaptively respond to changes in Arctic environments by 2050?” At the workshop, Arctic researchers, Indigenous Peoples, and policy makers collaboratively identified plausible states of Arctic environments in the coming decades and the related research needs. Results were presented in the form of a robustness analysis, a quantitative scenarios method that was developed by evolve:IT LLP (Drs. Erik Gauger and Marc Müller-Stoffels) in collaboration with Z_punkt GmbH. The Robustness Analysis recognized that a good—or robust—scenario should be simultaneously plausible and self-consistent, and the analysis weights those traits in the calculation of viable raw scenarios. The results were communicated in scenarios narratives.